


Not Far From the Tree

by Artifiction



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Blood, Dark, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's An Ampersand Not A Slash, No Romance, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28396902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artifiction/pseuds/Artifiction
Summary: Kel has always disliked whips, but it wasn't until the summer of 455 HE that she discovered she hated them.Flashback set during Lady Knight.
Relationships: Keladry of Mindelan & Joren of Stone Mountain
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Not Far From the Tree

>   
> Two yards beyond them was a flogging post. “Here’s another symbol of your office,” he explained, handing over a cowhide whip. Kel nearly dropped it in her distaste but hid her feelings behind her very best Yamani mask...
> 
> From Chapter Four of Lady Knight

* * *

_As the whip settled into her hand, her skin prickled at the sensation of the leather, soft, almost sticky, and warm from Elbridge's hand. Memory struck her like an unpadded lance, rocking her back._

It had been a long day in the Royal Forest, her third summer field camp, and Joren's last. He'd done something vile to her —how strange that she couldn't remember what, anymore— but with uncharacteristic sloppiness, had done it in the open, counting on the training master to be busy elsewhere. He hadn't been. Kel could still remember Lord Wyldon's voice, cutting through the air, edged with a strange fury she'd never heard in it before. "Page Joren, what in the name of _Mithros_ do you think you're doing?" Strange, that she could remember his words, his voice, the way it had _snapped_ but not what Joren had done. Fixed too in her mind was that when Wyldon had announced the intended punishment, Joren had fought. Not with cold precision, but with a frantic, angry energy. She hadn't expected that, hadn't expected him to refuse direct orders. It had taken Wyldon and three pages to drag him to a tree, wrap his arms around it, and tie his wrists together. The fight had gone out of him after a few moments, and he'd sagged silently against the tree. A silence had settled over the whole clearing as squires, pages, Shang, and all held their breath. Wyldon, two strides from the tree, a long cowhide whip in his hand, had turned to them, watching them, expression unreadable. "When we are in courts of law, nobles and commoners are treated differently. What we owe the law, and what the law owes us, differs. But in battle, every man under your command must be treated without difference. To do otherwise will stoke the sort of resentment between officers, knights, and the enlisted men that can destroy a unit from within. There is no room in war for our noble privilege. We use the guidelines of the army for punishment. The infraction that Page Joren has committed carries with it a disciplinary response of twenty lashes."

Everyone in the clearing had winced. Ten lashes could render a man useless for anything but bed rest for a week. Twenty, without a healer present, could cripple him. "Ordinarily, as the commanding officer, I would administer the punishment myself." Kel could see the shiver that went through Joren at that thought, his face hidden, pressed against the bark of the tree. "But as you are here to learn I will instead assign this duty to one of you." Wyldon's eyes roved their ranks, and settled on her. "Page Keladry."

_Her knuckles were white around Elbridge's whip. She was there again, in that clearing._

Her eyes rose to meet Lord Wyldon's. If it had been her choice, she wouldn't have even watched this punishment. Whippings were barbaric. Every page that stood near her took a step back, leaving her alone. "As the aggrieved party, by the old traditions, if I do not carry out the punishment, it falls to you." He extended the whip to her. The twenty feet that separated them yawned into a vast chasm, and she stood before it paralyzed, as if it were one in truth, not an open field of grass. Seconds ticked by.   
  
"I'm waiting, Page Keladry." Cold rushed through her. Was it not enough for him to make her climb every height they came across? Being forced to whip a fellow page, even Joren, was some new evil she had not expected from him. Neal saved her from hesitation by leaning forward and gently shoving her between the shoulder blades. To keep from stumbling, which was worse than hesitating, she took a step, and then another. Her gaze was fixed on Lord Wyldon, not on Joren or the whip. She half-expected Joren to start struggling again at the prospect of being whipped by her, but he was uncharacteristically silent, head bowed against the tree. Had the training master gagged him when she wasn't looking?

She knew she was close enough when the handle of the whip, well-oiled and supple, smacked into her hand, extended by Lord Wyldon. He held her gaze steadily. "You will administer twenty strokes to Page Joren's back. To allow you to focus on the task, I will count the strokes for you." He let go of the whip. "I expect proper, solid lashes. Not limp-wristed flailing." Lord Wyldon had watched her fight with a sword. He knew how much power she could put behind a blow. For the first and only time, Kel regretted the arm-strengthening exercises she had put herself through every day for the last three years.  
  
"Take your stance, Page Keladry." His voice came from a distance. He'd taken several steps back, waiting for her to begin. Kel stared grimly at the whip for a moment, then at Joren. In tunic and breeches, his face hidden by the tree, he could be anyone. Only his unmistakeable silver-blond hair identified him. It had been tied it up in a horsetail and tucked it over his shoulder, out of the way. _He's your enemy_ , whispered a voice in her head. Kel stomped it down. Joren was a bully, and for that, she'd fight him hand-to-hand, face-to-face, and gladly. This was no fight. There was no pride or joy in whipping him. Hesitating, she lifted the implement, feeling its weight. Much lighter than even a wooden practice sword, it snaked through the air as if hungry to inflict pain. Bracing herself, she brought her arm down and across. The whip followed the motion gleefully, lightly tracing across Joren's back.  
  
He jerked. Behind her, Wyldon's voice was a bark, "Like you mean it, Page Keladry!" Kel thought she heard a nervous giggle from one of the pages, but didn't turn to look. She closed her eyes, thinking, _I am stone_. The whip lay draped across the dirt, ready to strike again. If Lord Wyldon was going to make her do this, she might as well get it over with as quickly as she could. For her sake and for Joren's. Gritting her teeth, willing her face to stone, she raised her arm, and this time, brought it down properly. The whip struck Joren with an audible crack, and the boy jerked. She'd seen convicts' heads recoil after a lash. His remained still, pressed against the tree.

"One." Wyldon's voice was even. The whip was low to the ground again. Hating herself for doing it, she raised her arm, and delivered the second lash. Joren shuddered, and his arms clutches the tree tighter.  
  
"Two." This time, she came from the other direction, knowing that hitting the same place each time would make the pain worse. The lash left a line across his tunic, but she knew she hadn't hit as hard as the previous two strikes. She waited for a moment, but behind her, the training master was silent. For a moment, she understood Neal's desire to strangle Lord Wyldon of Cavall with every fiber of her being.   
  
If not for her Yamani training, she would have put her anger into the next strike, but she controlled the impulse, and struck again, harder. Joren rocked forward as much as the tree allowed, then back, and she could hear his breathing, now, coming faster.   
  
"Three." Evidently, Wyldon was satisfied. She felt numb as she delivered the next stroke, and the next. With each hit, the whip drew a line into the tunic, sticking it fast to Joren's skin. Those lines were turning a sullen red. Kel knew that nobles were allowed to keep their shirts on while they were flogged as Joren had here, out of step with Wyldon's grand words of equal treatment. Even through the tunic, the whip was breaking skin, and while she was certain that it must be an improvement over a bareback flogging, she didn't envy him the pain of having the linen dug out of his wounds.   
  
"Eight." Joren was shaking in earnest, now, a tremoring that didn't stop between blows, but his face remained curled into the tree. His breathing had gone from quick to raspy. He hadn't cried out. In this way, she supposed, Tortallans were entirely like Yamanis, believing in silence as strength. She almost wished he would scream, just to break the torturous silence with something that was neither the crack of a whip, nor a number spoken in clipped Common.   
  
It took two more strikes before Joren began to weep. She wasn't sure how she knew he was crying without seeing his face, but she was certain, from the way his hunched shoulders shook with each breath, that he was. It was the problem with valuing mindless resilience. Everyone reached their breaking point, and if you shamed people for breaking, you just stacked the pain of failure on the pain of suffering. For his sake and the sake of his pride, she hoped Wyldon was far enough that he didn't see what she could in those rising and falling shoulders.  
  
"Fourteen." Joren's back was a patchwork of stripes in each direction. She was doing her best to vary the blows, knowing it was only a small mercy, but having no others to provide.   
  
"Fifteen," made him hiss, audibly, the first sound he'd made that was not the scrabbling of flesh against rough bark or breathing. He flinched immediately after the hiss, waiting for another blow. Kel switched hands, her right bicep aching.   
  
He didn't make a single other sound for the remaining strokes, but she could tell his sobbing had grown worse. His entire back shook with the choked-down sounds.  
  
"Twenty."  
  
She threw the whip to the ground the moment the words left Lord Wyldon's mouth. She didn't care if he yelled at her about mistreating equipment, or about a knight's duty to take care of his possessions. It wasn't her whip, or she'd have thrown it into a fire. Never had anything she had held felt so vile. In front of her, Joren was huddled against the tree. The horsetail tie had come undone. His blond hair spilled every which way, some strands of it even pressed into the crimson lines of the lash marks. She didn't remember when that had happened, and it sickened her to see.  
  
Kel moved to walk away from the scene, but Wyldon caught her by the arm. It took everything she had not to tear herself out of his grip. His eyes found and caught hers, and she stared into his inscrutable expression. "An adequate performance, Mindelan, but incomplete." She stared up at him. If he made her pick up that whip again, she was not certain what she would do with it, only that Neal would approve. Letting go of her arm, he turned to the assembled pages, and she with him. A sea of silent, ashen faces stared back at her. She'd expected at least some of them to be gleeful or excited by the visceral display. If they were, none showed it. It might have been a trick of the light, but she thought she saw glints of green fire on Neal's fingers. Wyldon's voice rang out. "After a soldier is disciplined with the lash, a commander must make every effort to ensure that the soldier's punishment is limited to the lashing. Letting the wounds fester is unacceptable, and if I hear of neglect leading to infection in a prisoner of yours, you will find that my reach as training master is long indeed. The wounds must be cleaned, and any that need stitching must be stitched."   
  
He turned to her. "Page Keladry. As a third-year page, you have taken the course on wound-care from the palace healers." She had. Cleaning and stitching cuts had been on their little examinations, not a month before. "Consider this an evaluation of your skills in the field." He extended to her a simple leather bundle, its outside emblazoned with the three-fold-circle of the Mother in white, the mark of a non-magical healer's kit.   
  
Kel took it woodenly. As she did, Wyldon motioned for two pages to approach. After a moment, they did. When at a loss, she could always fall back on her training. Her eyes searched the ground for somewhere flat and smooth big enough to lay Joren down. She found a spot only a few strides from the tree. Somehow, she made it there, and knelt down to undo the ties on the pack and fold it open. Everything was present. A bottle of the dark green liquid that burned out infection. Bandages. Fine needles and threads. Even short wooden rods that could be fitted together to make proper splints for fingers, wrists, and ankles. She checked everything with quick mechanical motions, then looked up to find Wyldon and his two recruits had unrolled a bedroll in front of her, and were lowering Joren onto it, face-first.   
  
"Could you—" Her mouth was dryer than the Southern Desert, and her voice croaked. She licked her lips, and tried again. "Could you take his shirt off him?"   
  
The two pages glanced at Lord Wyldon, who shook his head. "It'll be more trouble than it's worth to pull it off, Mindelan. You've got a knife. Use it."   
  
She only got a momentary look at Joren's face before he hid it in the bedroll, but she could see his eyes were red, his face bruised from scraping against the tree, his cheeks damp and filthy. Her stomach rolled. She could not imagine anything less honorable than beating a bound man with a whip. Up close, she could see her handiwork on his back. Twenty bloody strokes crisscrossed his tunic. Staring down at it, she realized that Lord Wyldon was right. Getting the tunic off of him would have been hopeless. Under the repeated blows, it had been reduced to tatters. _Stone, stone, stone_ , she thought, as she drew out her belt knife, and, with the most careful motions she could, cut the edge of the shirt along his shoulders and down the sides, careful not to slice the blond hairs were strewn across the fabric.  
  
Joren didn't move or speak, a silent and piteous form on the bedroll. Her fingers found the edges of the shredded cloth, and slowly, not wanting to widen any cuts, she pulled it away and dropped it in a sodden puddle on the grass. A few scraps of cloth remained, lodged into the long cuts of the lash. She pulled them out with a little contraption of two braised-together slips of copper, pinching them together to grasp at the fine edges of the cloth.  
  
Leaning back, she looked over the results, and a wave of sickness hit her. It wasn't for the wounds. It was for what lay under them. Though half-obscured by smears of red, Perfect Pale Unblemished Joren's back was a ruin of scars. Long white lines, some stretched into wide rivers by how much he'd grown since he'd gotten them, traced in every direction, more than she could possibly count. Her fresh red marks were just a new layer atop the old. 

With a start, Kel suddenly realized that in all her three years as a page, she had never once seen Joren go swimming. She bathed separately, of course, but the summer training camps provided ample chances to leap into streams and rivers that every boy delighted at, save Joren. She'd seen him offer the occasional haughty refusal, and had always assumed he was vain of his long blond locks and didn't care to dry them.

Their training had taught them to know how old scars were. Looking at the map in front of her was like trying to pick out a pair of footprints through the churned mud of a battlefield, but she knew with certainty that not a single one was less than four years old. Joren hadn't been whipped since he'd turned ten, become a Page and left Stone Mountain.   
  
All of a sudden, it all made sense. His strange, desperate fight when he'd been told he'd be lashed. The way he'd hunched, and shivered, and sobbed, but never shouted. Kel's eyes came up, and she looked for Lord Wyldon. He was there, beside her. The two pages were gone, having returned to the huddle on the edge of the clearing. She was certain none of them could see the painstakingly concealed shame drawn plainly across Joren's back. Lord Wyldon's voice was quiet. "It is ugly, this habit of some lords to beat their lessons into their children." His tone was utterly unreadable. Kel struggled to keep impassivity on her face as she looked up at him, then down at the fourteen year old boy crying into the bedroll in front of her. It took her time to find it in herself to speak. She hoped that those seconds diminished the venom in her voice enough that Lord Wyldon would think she felt it only for the Lord of Stone Mountain.  
  
"Yes, my lord. It is." 

* * *

>   
> ...She didn’t want to feel the leather in her hand, so she hung it from her dagger hilt.
> 
> Continued from Chapter Four of Lady Knight

**Author's Note:**

> This is not *strictly* canon compliant because Joren becomes a squire and makes fake-peace with Kel the year before this in canon. Feel free to decide for yourself if I inserted an extra year, or if Joren was younger in this universe. 
> 
> All dubious credit for this concept goes to the lovely people of the Tamora Pierce Discord, in the not-safe-for-anywhere #nsfw channel, especially @the_big_wee_hag, and @LadyLingua.


End file.
